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Friday, July 27, 2012

Hide and Seek

Hide and Seek, 12 x 16, oil on linen

When I did my half-day workshop last month in Knights Landing, I painted an old tractor as a demo. I took a bunch of reference photos at that time, and this here is a painting I did recently from one of those photos.

The tractor, I found later, was a 1950's model Oliver (correct me if I'm wrong) and had a lot of character. It was parked not in grass, as I've shown here, but just on a flat dirt surface. The environment is entirely out of my head - not so difficult in this case because it's just a field of grass with a few fence posts sticking out of it.

I placed the tractor high on the canvas so that I may have a big foreground. I also wanted the tall grass to obscure the bottom part of the tractor; an idea which sprang from my cow demo from a few posts ago.

Obscurity is something I'm really interested in, you see. How much information is absolutely necessary in order to communicate the fact that it's a tractor? Can I show less than the whole silhouette? How much less? Which part or parts of the tractor are most effective as visual clues?

These are questions I asked myself as I experimented with different amounts of obscurity. Untidy grass field like this is an ideal tool to explore the issue, as it could be as tall or short as necessary; a very flexible device.

This is my third Oliver painting, and I'm starting to see the old tractor as something of a character in a story. Not that I'm going to write a story and illustrate it, as I'm not really interested in the narrative aspect of such a series, but I do have other compositional ideas that I want to try. Fortunately I have a bunch of photos from different angles, so I should be able to do a variety.